


flotsam, jetsam

by MissAntlers



Category: Black Sails
Genre: For the most part, M/M, Post-Series, also?? vague maritime vocabulary references, i don't know why i always write silver like he's some sort of supernatural entity, probably because he's beautiful and i don't trust him, years later silver encounters flint on a lonely beach somewhere in cornwall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-28 01:43:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12595264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAntlers/pseuds/MissAntlers
Summary: “You let your hair grow out again.” Silver grins, and it almost hurts, as though he’s stretching out a muscle he hasn’t used in a long time. Perhaps he hasn’t. He doesn’t remember now.Flint nods slowly. “You cut yours back.” His voice is hoarse, like he’s been drinking seawater.“I was starting to look like a witch.”Flint looks out to sea at the darkening horizon. “Perhaps you are.”





	flotsam, jetsam

**Author's Note:**

> Well, well, well, if it isn't more nonsense from my Tumblr

Flotsam /ˈflɒtsəm/  
n. _  
Goods found floating at sea as a result of a shipwreck._

Jetsam /ˈdʒɛtsəm/  
n. _  
Goods cast out of a ship in danger of being wrecked, and afterwards washed ashore._

 

* * *

 

“When I am old,” says Silver, settling back in his hammock, “I’ll live in a cottage by the sea, with my wife and our seven children. And I’ll go fishing every morning, and grow barnacles in my beard.”

“You don’t have a beard,” Logan points out.

Silver shrugs. “I will when I’m old.”

Muldoon leans over and grins at them. “I’m going to start my own business. Spices, I should think. Or silks. Then I’ll retire a rich man. What about you, Logan?”

“I’ll marry Charlotte, of course.”

“Of course.”

“What about the captain?” Silver asks.

Logan laughs, and there’s something cruel in the sound that Silver fears embeds itself in the timbers of the ship.

“He’ll never get old.”

 

* * *

 

Everything in Cornwall is made of grey slate stone, even the man standing down by the water’s edge. There’s rain on the horizon, smudging the low clouds, but the air is already wet, as though it’s licking its lips in preparation for the storm.

The wind picks up and runs its finger through the man’s hair, as pale as old bones.

“I remember when your hair was red,” Silver says, and his mouth is full of cobwebs.

Flint turns, stone coming to life. His face is a winter landscape, his shoulders the solitary moors of this cold county.

“You let it grow out again.” Silver grins, and it almost hurts, as though he’s stretching out a muscle he hasn’t used in a long time. Perhaps he hasn’t. He doesn’t remember now.

Flint nods slowly. “You cut yours back.” His voice is hoarse, like he’s been drinking seawater.

“I was starting to look like a witch.”

Flint looks out to sea at the darkening horizon. “Perhaps you are.”

The storm rages through the night, hurling the waves at the sharp black rocks down on the beach, just as all the words Silver never said crash against his teeth, unspoken. Flint’s little cottage is mostly a fireplace, and they hunch in the scant warmth, listening to the rain on the roof and the wind shaking the windowpanes. Morning finds them curled around each other like two strange runes.

The tempest has left the day with crisper edges, and the air feels as clean as the first air man ever breathed, Silver thinks. He feels like a lad again, picking his way carefully through the tide pools with his crutch, collecting trinkets left by the sea. He finds a large piece of bladderwrack and drapes it around his stiff neck as though it were a shawl. He weaves seaweed into his hair where he knows it’s going grey at the temples, and he gathers mussel and limpet shells, their pearly insides glinting in the white sun. He arranges them in his beard, and when Flint finds him, sitting on the rocks and smelling of brine, he laughs. It’s an old sound, and for a moment Silver feels the heat of Nassau on his brow, and two legs under him.

“What are you supposed to be?” Flint says.

Silver crosses his arms. “I’d have thought you’d know a mermaid when you see one.”

Flint shakes his head, but his face is softer than it was yesterday. He moves carefully between the rock pools until he’s at Silver’s side. His knees crack as he sits, and the sound leaves a mournful echo in the cliffside. The sun is slowly warming the stone beneath them, and they’re content to sit there for countless whiles, gazing at the ocean.

“I remember when a sea that calm bore nothing but trouble,” Silver says.

“Calm seas never a good sailor made,” Flint replies.

Silver nods, and he can taste shark in his mouth.

“These rocks remind me of the Wrecks, don’t you think?” he adds.

“The night we met.” Flint glances at him, and there’s that old wicked smile. “You could have been a mermaid then, perhaps. Pretty as anything.”

Silver snorts. “Foolish as anything, certainly.”

“You were young.”

“We were both young,” Silver corrects him.

But Flint sighs, and he sounds hollow on the inside. “I don’t think I was ever young.”

_Life was too hard on you too fast._

In the afternoon they scavenge driftwood from the beach to sure up the storm damage to Flint’s cottage. Flint stands where the water laps at the sand, and Silver wonders how he came to be washed up here too. He doesn’t ask. Best to enjoy a good thing while it lasts, and he remembers what Max used to say, that nothing built on sand is ever permanent. The thought of Flint is the only constant he’s ever had, though, so perhaps this time, just this once, Max gets to be wrong. He watches Flint hammering water-worn wood over a hole in the roof, his arms leaner than they used to be, but still strong, still sure of the carpentry his grandfather taught him so many, many years ago. Flint can make them something permanent, Silver thinks.

When evening comes they lay out on the sand, still warm with the memory of the day. The joints in Silver’s good leg complain loudly as he settles down, but he ignores them and listens to Flint instead.

“Will you stay, do you think?”

Silver sighs, stretching out his old bones. “You know, James, I don’t think that’s up to me.”

“It’s never simple with you, is it?”

“You’d have tired of me long ago if it was. But, no––I do believe a man has the right to lay claim to anything he finds on the shore.”

He rolls over onto his side, ignoring the way his sockets grate, and smirks up at Flint in the dimming light. The man’s face may have aged, his sun-battered skin not sitting as comfortably on his bone structure as it used to, but those cut-glass eyes are him all the way back through the years.

“You found me,” Silver says, “that night in the Wrecks.”

“Is that so?” Flint’s smile has a sly edge to it in the dark. “Well, that just goes to show no good can come of mermaids. You’ve been nothing but trouble.”

Silver props himself up on his elbows and kisses him, and their lips are salt-bitten and sandy and thin, but he doesn’t care. He grins against Flint’s mouth as he says: “Calm seas never a good sailor made, Captain.”

In the morning they’re still lying there, still as the rocks, just two more remnants of wreckage washed up on the shore.

**Author's Note:**

> Catch these sad hands at flurgburgler.tumblr.com


End file.
